No More Learning

Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years--seven
usually--a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman
vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her
husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received
word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by
faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing
to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the
peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being
a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of
Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was
happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat?
and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well
that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery
food, that she might keep him with her, refused, and came home to his
people in Sligo.

Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond,
a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the
Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild
duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben,
issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of
them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round,
and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home
to find it was but faery glamour. To this hour on the border of the
lake is shown a half-dug trench--the signet of their impiety. A little
way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of faery
kidnapping.
I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who
sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as
though she remembered the dancing of her youth.

A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just married bride,
met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were
faeries, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band.
To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when
she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he
should eat the faery food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into
that bloodless dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards
with three of the cavalcade; and he played on, realizing nothing until
he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly
all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to
the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the
keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic
poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my
white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.

Sometimes one hears of stolen people acting as good genii to the
living, as in this tale, heard also close by the haunted pond, of John
Kirwan of Castle Hacket. The Kirwans[H] are a family much rumoured of
in peasant stories, and believed to be the descendants of a man and a
spirit. They have ever been famous for beauty, and I have read that the
mother of the present Lord Cloncurry was of their tribe.

John Kirwan was a great horse-racing man, and once landed in Liverpool
with a fine horse, going racing somewhere in middle England. That
evening, as he walked by the docks, a slip of a boy came up and asked
where he was stabling his horse. In such and such a place, he answered.